Nodding my head and up and down through this one. You've tapped an enormous vein: the potential pleasure and sociability of manual work.
In the trades today there is a constant tension between the need to survive economically and the innate desire to slow down, do real crafting, make beauty and enjoy one's time with others. This is an eight to ten hours a day, five to six days a week question, the very nut of being a tradesperson. And it gets talked about a lot. There seems to be two types of people, those in love with the work and the life, trying to carve out of the "efficiency" mindset the ability to make beauty and fellowship, and others who crave money, who have figured out how to make it by doing things quickly and poorly, and often show up at job sites with the question "keeping busy?"
A couple years ago I was lucky enough to spend months on a high-end remodel where most the crew were committed to their crafts and damn good at them. Such a happy band of renegades in a work environment that was at times effervescent with banter and enthusiasm. Not so beautiful is the reality that only those doing "high-end" work tend get those opportunities. The poor, the immigrants, the less privileged end up on spray crews in toxic hazes whiting out walls for convention centers and such.
Last point: what you seem to hint at here is a politics of desire vs. directive, a deep ocean of motivation that got lost along the way.
Thanks, Rob! There's a great deal in this comment. I've sensed the tension you're describing within the trades, though without the direct experience from which you can describe it so clearly.
It reminds me of a passage from Berger, versions of which appear in his essay 'Past Seen from a Possible Future' and in the book of Ways of Seeing:
"The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between ‘masterpiece’ and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work –an increasingly after the seventeenth century– was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average."
Your last point rings true. I've often spoken about the twin logic of the market and the state, how this pairing has expanded across the social landscape over the generations of modernity, and the inability of either to draw on the "reserves of enthusiasm, dedication and deep pragmatism which people draw on when they come together to do things for their own reasons, rather than because they have been paid or told to do them". (The quote is from an old essay: https://dougald.nu/the-fairly-big-society/ )
The relation between work and play reminds me of the conversations I had with old folk in the mountains of Asturias. When remembering the past, they all concurred that the most joyful moments happened during the most intense labour moments of the year (ex. Cereal harvest). Most of them would have been undernourished but worked hard from dawn to dusk; in the evening community would came together, celebrating and merry making. These old folks often commented, with perplexity, that their grandchildren didn’t work that much, often felt tired but above all didn’t seem all that joyful.
I knew then there was something to be learned from this. I underline that they were perplexed, not nostalgic. They knew well that that past is not to be romanticised. But they also knew of something precious that got lost. I think it’s retrievable. But it requires creativity and will power.
Thanks for sharing that, Elsa. It resonates with fleeting glimpses that I've had in various parts of the world. And that distinction – 'they were perplexed, not nostalgic' – is a helpful one.
I'm curious about any clues you may have found that contribute to your sense that what was lost may nonetheless be retrievable?
Good question. Retrieving fellowship and joy. I’ll prudently reply for myself. I need to actively seek and build community. Unlike in the past, having one is not a given. Forces of dispersion and atomisation rule (my) social ecosystem. Advantages: this is a community of choice, meaning greater freedom.
Moreover, it needs to be a community “in the flesh”. Virtual communities do not deliver that embodied, joyous oomph (especially obvious when accomplishing a common goal).
Just as ancestors applied a lot of energy and skills in managing the environment, I suspect I need to do my share in cultivating vibrant and healthy social systems (socio-culture).
Last, practicing joy as a choice. Most of the things that hinder my joy may be loud but are not fundamentally true. Soul de-cluttering. Purgatio.
Overall swimming against the tide. The way of the Salmon. This journey to the source is not regressive. Not just because it is not possible to step into the same river twice but because the alpha must necessarily be contained in the omega.
I'd add that (in my experience) virtual forms of gathering can strengthen this kind of work, they are just not a substitute for the actual "in the flesh" kind of community, as you say.
Anyway, what you write chimes with some things I've been writing this afternoon for my next post here.
I have been thinking about this post since I read it yesterday.
It occurs to me that in my childhood, my working class family and our friends had fun. In the middle class life that I have now, there is much less fun. In the middle class world leisure time appears to be allocated for self-improvement, and there is a streak of puritanism.
I don't know if middle class life was always a bit lacking in fun, or whether the lack of fun now stretches across all classes.
This is a great question to think about – and my hunch is it's a bit of both.
There's definitely a contrast in attitudes and habits here, with roots going back to the 19th century (if not further). There's a history of a middle class culture that buys in deeply to the logic of modernity and treats the self as a project to invest in – and a working class culture, faced with the necessity of work within the modern industrial system, but sceptical about the ideology of this system and recreating pockets of sociability, conviviality, play in whatever corners it could carve out. These are huge generalisations, obviously, but I've heard enough stories within my own family and from friends that would bear this out as a general pattern.
Then there's a story of the erosion of working class culture, coupled to the encroachment of the leisure and entertainment industries, which starts well before the post-1970s undermining of organised labour and so many skilled industries. Richard Hoggart was already charting these cultural changes in working class communities in the 1950s and made it his life's work. Jeremy Seabrook is another author who brings a lot to this story. And, from an American context, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place also has a lot to say about the disproportionate importance of the spaces of sociability where people spend a few hours a week, and the patterns associated with these spaces. (With painful irony, Starbucks stole one of Oldenburg's key concepts, 'the third place', and turned it into a marketing slogan while accelerating the destruction of real spaces of sociability in cities.) I guess Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone belongs somewhere in the mix, too, with its key metaphor of how Americans went from belonging to bowling clubs to going bowling becoming a privatised consumer activity.
Anyway, you weren't asking for a reading list... but I just found these connections sparking as I thought about your comment! :-)
Thanks for your response and your references. I completely agree about the erosion of working class culture.
If i had to distill things down I would say that fun follows on naturally from mutual aid.
But people who are wealthy enough to buy in assistance (aka the middle classes) don't need to bother being sociable with their workmates and neighbours. So they don't build the bonds and they don't get the fun, either.
At least that's how it seemed to me as a kid, watching various friends and neighbours helping my dad try to keep our old banger on the road when we couldn't afford a mechanic.
As far as know any kind of fun, laughter, singing, celebration or even colored clothing were verboten and subject to severe punishments in Calvin's mini-fascist state in Geneva. Many/most/all traditional Calvinist church buildings were devoid of any color and very angular, essentially like court houses (places of stern judgment). And of course in England the Protestants sacked and desecrated many color-filled Catholic churches and cathedrals.. And look what the austere hard headed Protestant Cromwell did to the Irish Catholics too.
Having grown up among the (much gentler) descendants of Calvinism, I remember on my early journeys out into the wider world, a growing sense of the strangeness of the particular religious buildings I grew up around, with their whitewashed walls. Even where the taboo on figurative representation was strong (as in Islam), no one else seemed to make such aesthetically scoured spaces in which to meet the sacred. Though the human need for beauty is ultimately irrepressible and the aesthetic will find its way back, one way or another, as in the often beautiful and moving hymn-singing that reemerges in these low church forms of Christianity.
But there's a lot to explore in the 'an-aesthetic' impulse of modernity (Lewis Hyde's 1975 pamphlet, 'Alcohol and Poetry' is fascinating on this) and its debt to Calvin.
In the context of the KLF, interesting to note that Bill Drummond is the son of a Church of Scotland minister, so also an heir to the lineage of Calvinism.
Listened. Thanks to you and Ed. Listening to the exchange with Roselle, I realized (again) that I never know quite what i will say to someone until I am saying it with them.
Work as play? An idea the world so desperately requires, but perhaps as a portmanteau (or "blend word"), which makes more sonic sense as worlay than plork, the latter being a construction as greenly ugly as "blog" -- one of those very strange words which could only emerge as an extension of the internet as an altogether other world, a beyond world all its own. A color of green associated with the underworld which comes up embarrassingly sometimes when one has had way too much to drink.
If we don't call it worlay, surely we must give it some other name, for it longs to have a name after all of these many years living in our upper world of light, trees, and grasses--under the brightness of the sun. Can our work become fun again?
To be fun, our work will have to become our own, a spontaneous exuberance emerging from our love of life. But can life be our own? Can it lay out its own measure? Can life be music again?
I thought you might find things to connect to in this post, James! Your comment reminds me of my old pal Pat Kane, who wrote a book called The Play Ethic.
'Can life be music again?' This is the question hinted at by the resurgence in talk about enchantment. I'm very taken with Patrick Curry's definition of 'enchantment' (in How Wonder Works) as to be 'in a song', the literal etymology of the word, and thus to inhabit the world in such a way.
Not so long ago, Dougald, you gave a talk there in Sweden... in which, near the end, you spoke about the role of art and artists in these times of the ending of our world. I found that a potent talk, and I'll have to go back and listen to it again.
'
-- Making Good Ruins – Keynote at Climate Existence, Sigtuna, August 2023 --
Long ago now, I was on track to become an artist -- a visual artist. In college I double majored in art and psychology, so I did a lot of hands on studio art in many different media, and studied art history. But at some point I began to turn away from wanting to be an artist of that kind. I wanted to make my entire life into art -- to make all of life into art. And I suppose I've done so in my own way, but I had no idea how much such art depends on others entering that play ethic with me, and how few know the moves or care to try them. I ended up becoming a philosopher of sorts, with my entire life focused on trying to conjure aptness in evoking and invoking the aesthetic and the ethical as a seamless whole bound to every dimension of life, not as domains apart at all.
Life really actually is a song, an enchantment. You know it, and I know it. And we're living it as best we know how. But I never thought such a depth of grief would swallow me up as has come to pass. Collectively, our art is that of the somnambulist. And that just hurts.
This struck me very forcibly after a few day’s listening to what remains of the birdsong in the NZ forests these past days, with Illich’s comment of how our music is unnaturally tuned in a Procrustean manner doing its depth charge work.
My favorite apostle of fun is Zippy the Pinhead whose now famous phrase/calling is Are We Having Fun Yet! http://www.zippythepinhead.com
Have you ever noticed that Mickey Mouse was always essentially always happy. As such he could quite rightly be called a modern secular Icon of Happiness, especially as he is known all over the world.
Nodding my head and up and down through this one. You've tapped an enormous vein: the potential pleasure and sociability of manual work.
In the trades today there is a constant tension between the need to survive economically and the innate desire to slow down, do real crafting, make beauty and enjoy one's time with others. This is an eight to ten hours a day, five to six days a week question, the very nut of being a tradesperson. And it gets talked about a lot. There seems to be two types of people, those in love with the work and the life, trying to carve out of the "efficiency" mindset the ability to make beauty and fellowship, and others who crave money, who have figured out how to make it by doing things quickly and poorly, and often show up at job sites with the question "keeping busy?"
A couple years ago I was lucky enough to spend months on a high-end remodel where most the crew were committed to their crafts and damn good at them. Such a happy band of renegades in a work environment that was at times effervescent with banter and enthusiasm. Not so beautiful is the reality that only those doing "high-end" work tend get those opportunities. The poor, the immigrants, the less privileged end up on spray crews in toxic hazes whiting out walls for convention centers and such.
Last point: what you seem to hint at here is a politics of desire vs. directive, a deep ocean of motivation that got lost along the way.
Thanks, Rob! There's a great deal in this comment. I've sensed the tension you're describing within the trades, though without the direct experience from which you can describe it so clearly.
It reminds me of a passage from Berger, versions of which appear in his essay 'Past Seen from a Possible Future' and in the book of Ways of Seeing:
"The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between ‘masterpiece’ and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work –an increasingly after the seventeenth century– was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average."
Your last point rings true. I've often spoken about the twin logic of the market and the state, how this pairing has expanded across the social landscape over the generations of modernity, and the inability of either to draw on the "reserves of enthusiasm, dedication and deep pragmatism which people draw on when they come together to do things for their own reasons, rather than because they have been paid or told to do them". (The quote is from an old essay: https://dougald.nu/the-fairly-big-society/ )
"Last point: what you seem to hint at here is a politics of desire vs. directive, a deep ocean of motivation that got lost along the way."
OMG! This gets three BINGOs from me!
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet Dougald but just to add here my favourite quote from the great John Berger, ‘the world is doubled by play’.
Ah, thanks for that, Margaret! Remind me where that line comes from?
Dougald, it’s from Berger’s small but packed book, ‘and our faces, my heart, brief as photos’ - pp 69/70 in my copy.
The relation between work and play reminds me of the conversations I had with old folk in the mountains of Asturias. When remembering the past, they all concurred that the most joyful moments happened during the most intense labour moments of the year (ex. Cereal harvest). Most of them would have been undernourished but worked hard from dawn to dusk; in the evening community would came together, celebrating and merry making. These old folks often commented, with perplexity, that their grandchildren didn’t work that much, often felt tired but above all didn’t seem all that joyful.
I knew then there was something to be learned from this. I underline that they were perplexed, not nostalgic. They knew well that that past is not to be romanticised. But they also knew of something precious that got lost. I think it’s retrievable. But it requires creativity and will power.
Thanks for sharing that, Elsa. It resonates with fleeting glimpses that I've had in various parts of the world. And that distinction – 'they were perplexed, not nostalgic' – is a helpful one.
I'm curious about any clues you may have found that contribute to your sense that what was lost may nonetheless be retrievable?
Good question. Retrieving fellowship and joy. I’ll prudently reply for myself. I need to actively seek and build community. Unlike in the past, having one is not a given. Forces of dispersion and atomisation rule (my) social ecosystem. Advantages: this is a community of choice, meaning greater freedom.
Moreover, it needs to be a community “in the flesh”. Virtual communities do not deliver that embodied, joyous oomph (especially obvious when accomplishing a common goal).
Just as ancestors applied a lot of energy and skills in managing the environment, I suspect I need to do my share in cultivating vibrant and healthy social systems (socio-culture).
Last, practicing joy as a choice. Most of the things that hinder my joy may be loud but are not fundamentally true. Soul de-cluttering. Purgatio.
Overall swimming against the tide. The way of the Salmon. This journey to the source is not regressive. Not just because it is not possible to step into the same river twice but because the alpha must necessarily be contained in the omega.
Thanks, Elsa – this is a great list.
I'd add that (in my experience) virtual forms of gathering can strengthen this kind of work, they are just not a substitute for the actual "in the flesh" kind of community, as you say.
Anyway, what you write chimes with some things I've been writing this afternoon for my next post here.
I have been thinking about this post since I read it yesterday.
It occurs to me that in my childhood, my working class family and our friends had fun. In the middle class life that I have now, there is much less fun. In the middle class world leisure time appears to be allocated for self-improvement, and there is a streak of puritanism.
I don't know if middle class life was always a bit lacking in fun, or whether the lack of fun now stretches across all classes.
This is a great question to think about – and my hunch is it's a bit of both.
There's definitely a contrast in attitudes and habits here, with roots going back to the 19th century (if not further). There's a history of a middle class culture that buys in deeply to the logic of modernity and treats the self as a project to invest in – and a working class culture, faced with the necessity of work within the modern industrial system, but sceptical about the ideology of this system and recreating pockets of sociability, conviviality, play in whatever corners it could carve out. These are huge generalisations, obviously, but I've heard enough stories within my own family and from friends that would bear this out as a general pattern.
Then there's a story of the erosion of working class culture, coupled to the encroachment of the leisure and entertainment industries, which starts well before the post-1970s undermining of organised labour and so many skilled industries. Richard Hoggart was already charting these cultural changes in working class communities in the 1950s and made it his life's work. Jeremy Seabrook is another author who brings a lot to this story. And, from an American context, Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place also has a lot to say about the disproportionate importance of the spaces of sociability where people spend a few hours a week, and the patterns associated with these spaces. (With painful irony, Starbucks stole one of Oldenburg's key concepts, 'the third place', and turned it into a marketing slogan while accelerating the destruction of real spaces of sociability in cities.) I guess Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone belongs somewhere in the mix, too, with its key metaphor of how Americans went from belonging to bowling clubs to going bowling becoming a privatised consumer activity.
Anyway, you weren't asking for a reading list... but I just found these connections sparking as I thought about your comment! :-)
Thanks for your response and your references. I completely agree about the erosion of working class culture.
If i had to distill things down I would say that fun follows on naturally from mutual aid.
But people who are wealthy enough to buy in assistance (aka the middle classes) don't need to bother being sociable with their workmates and neighbours. So they don't build the bonds and they don't get the fun, either.
At least that's how it seemed to me as a kid, watching various friends and neighbours helping my dad try to keep our old banger on the road when we couldn't afford a mechanic.
As far as know any kind of fun, laughter, singing, celebration or even colored clothing were verboten and subject to severe punishments in Calvin's mini-fascist state in Geneva. Many/most/all traditional Calvinist church buildings were devoid of any color and very angular, essentially like court houses (places of stern judgment). And of course in England the Protestants sacked and desecrated many color-filled Catholic churches and cathedrals.. And look what the austere hard headed Protestant Cromwell did to the Irish Catholics too.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Having grown up among the (much gentler) descendants of Calvinism, I remember on my early journeys out into the wider world, a growing sense of the strangeness of the particular religious buildings I grew up around, with their whitewashed walls. Even where the taboo on figurative representation was strong (as in Islam), no one else seemed to make such aesthetically scoured spaces in which to meet the sacred. Though the human need for beauty is ultimately irrepressible and the aesthetic will find its way back, one way or another, as in the often beautiful and moving hymn-singing that reemerges in these low church forms of Christianity.
But there's a lot to explore in the 'an-aesthetic' impulse of modernity (Lewis Hyde's 1975 pamphlet, 'Alcohol and Poetry' is fascinating on this) and its debt to Calvin.
In the context of the KLF, interesting to note that Bill Drummond is the son of a Church of Scotland minister, so also an heir to the lineage of Calvinism.
Listened. Thanks to you and Ed. Listening to the exchange with Roselle, I realized (again) that I never know quite what i will say to someone until I am saying it with them.
Thanks, Richard! Grateful for your role in sparking this episode. That conversation between you and Roselle on the Berger post was wonderful.
Work as play? An idea the world so desperately requires, but perhaps as a portmanteau (or "blend word"), which makes more sonic sense as worlay than plork, the latter being a construction as greenly ugly as "blog" -- one of those very strange words which could only emerge as an extension of the internet as an altogether other world, a beyond world all its own. A color of green associated with the underworld which comes up embarrassingly sometimes when one has had way too much to drink.
If we don't call it worlay, surely we must give it some other name, for it longs to have a name after all of these many years living in our upper world of light, trees, and grasses--under the brightness of the sun. Can our work become fun again?
To be fun, our work will have to become our own, a spontaneous exuberance emerging from our love of life. But can life be our own? Can it lay out its own measure? Can life be music again?
I thought you might find things to connect to in this post, James! Your comment reminds me of my old pal Pat Kane, who wrote a book called The Play Ethic.
'Can life be music again?' This is the question hinted at by the resurgence in talk about enchantment. I'm very taken with Patrick Curry's definition of 'enchantment' (in How Wonder Works) as to be 'in a song', the literal etymology of the word, and thus to inhabit the world in such a way.
Not so long ago, Dougald, you gave a talk there in Sweden... in which, near the end, you spoke about the role of art and artists in these times of the ending of our world. I found that a potent talk, and I'll have to go back and listen to it again.
'
-- Making Good Ruins – Keynote at Climate Existence, Sigtuna, August 2023 --
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaCatcin7n8&t=6s
Long ago now, I was on track to become an artist -- a visual artist. In college I double majored in art and psychology, so I did a lot of hands on studio art in many different media, and studied art history. But at some point I began to turn away from wanting to be an artist of that kind. I wanted to make my entire life into art -- to make all of life into art. And I suppose I've done so in my own way, but I had no idea how much such art depends on others entering that play ethic with me, and how few know the moves or care to try them. I ended up becoming a philosopher of sorts, with my entire life focused on trying to conjure aptness in evoking and invoking the aesthetic and the ethical as a seamless whole bound to every dimension of life, not as domains apart at all.
Life really actually is a song, an enchantment. You know it, and I know it. And we're living it as best we know how. But I never thought such a depth of grief would swallow me up as has come to pass. Collectively, our art is that of the somnambulist. And that just hurts.
Ok Dougie!
We used to sing
This struck me very forcibly after a few day’s listening to what remains of the birdsong in the NZ forests these past days, with Illich’s comment of how our music is unnaturally tuned in a Procrustean manner doing its depth charge work.
Our most primal instruments lost to us
My favorite apostle of fun is Zippy the Pinhead whose now famous phrase/calling is Are We Having Fun Yet! http://www.zippythepinhead.com
Have you ever noticed that Mickey Mouse was always essentially always happy. As such he could quite rightly be called a modern secular Icon of Happiness, especially as he is known all over the world.